If Milo is gay, I say release the movie and prove it.
If he does, report back here and tell me what you saw (comments subject to editing) because I won't watch it, even if it becomes the last movie on earth.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Trump's right about the lending slowdown
In the 15 quarters ended 3Q2016, total loans in all sectors have grown by a measly 14.5%.
Compare the 15 quarters ended 3Q1986 when the measure grew by 53%.
The fact of the matter is lending hit the big brick wall in 2007. It has recovered but not to anything like the post-war rate where total credit market debt outstanding doubled every 6 to 11 years. Under Reagan it doubled in 6 years.
Ten years out from 2007, we're currently about $34 trillion behind the outside range with a year to go. We aren't going to make it.
Why that is has to do with the broken housing model more than anything else, and the failure to find anything else to replace it.
With overcapacity everywhere else in the economy, it doesn't seem likely anything will be found to take housing's place, either, except housing.
Maybe someone could revive "A Dodge in every garage and a chicken in every pot"?
Obama certainly failed to understand the central importance of housing to the economy, and Trump talk now of $1 trillion in infrastructure spending is laughably unimaginative, the equivalent of taking a wizz in the ocean.
Infrastructure spending isn't conceivably up to scaling the $34 trillion lending deficit we face.
Students revolt against Moochelle's school lunches throwing away $1 billion worth of food a year
From the story here:
Penn-Trafford High School is among more than 500 schools that have dropped out of the NSLP since strict nutrition regulations were imposed on schools through the Healthy Hunger Free Act championed by former first lady Michelle Obama.
The changes drove down school food sales nationwide for the first time in years and created an estimated $1 billion in additional food waste as students across the country revolted against the rules.
Obama had 950,062 on his deportation list as of May 21, 2016, he just wasn't deporting them
Hm. Imagine that.
From the story here:
The 680 seized in recent sweeps by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents represent just .07 percent of the 950,062 with deportation orders as of May 21, 2016. ... ICE has custody of just 11,006, or 1 percent, of the 950,062 ordered deported.
Dan Alpert is kooky, says economy will go nuts if Trump spends on infrastructure: Let's try cutting spending by $200 billion a year instead
Here:
“If you spend $200 billion in this economy in additional government infrastructure spending, rebuild bridges, airports and railways, especially if it’s well targeted. This economy is going to go crazy. It’s going to do great.”
Outlays in fiscal 2008 were $2.9825 trillion.
Between 2009 and 2016, outlays for the eight years, beyond that level, have come to $4.86 trillion. $200 billion or even $1 trillion isn't going to amount to doodleysquat if nearly $5 trillion has done nothing.
Cut federal spending and lower the tax rates and see what the people do with the money instead.
Laugh of the Day: Over 100 "Day Without Immigrants" protesters fired from their jobs
From the story here:
More than 100 protesters across the country were fired from their jobs after skipping work to take part in last week's "Day Without Immigrants" demonstration. Restaurants and day cares were among the businesses in states like Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma and New York where bosses fired workers after they didn't show up for work in order to protest. ... At Ben's Kosher Delicatessen Restaurant & Caterers in Long Island, New York, 25 workers were fired Friday when they returned to work, according to Telemundo 47. Police escorted the workers from the restaurant — most of whom were undocumented and have worked there for years.
Obama pollster Cornell Belcher gets one thing right: Hillary failed to hold the Obama coalition
Or as we say, 5.1 million former Obama voters in 39 states from 2008 didn't vote for Hillary in 2016.
Do Belcher's math. He estimates from exit polling data that about 7% of the non-white millennial electorate voted third party, allowing Trump to squeeze in. Hillary's total of 65.85 million popular votes supplemented by the 5.1 million in 39 states who didn't vote for her is 70.95 million, 7% of which is 5 million.
Belcher, who is black, racializes the whole thing from there, complaining that Democrats failed to make the race about race. But obviously these non-white millennials still voted for whites, so it wasn't about race for them either. It was about young progressives being unable to bring themselves to vote for two loathsome candidates, one of whom turned out to be more loathsome to more people than the other.
As they say in the legal profession, hard cases make bad law. Election 2016 was a hard case, and we shouldn't draw the wrong conclusions from it as both Democrats and Republicans still seem to be doing.
Belcher, here in Salon:
Demographics are destiny. What happens to a centrist Democrat quite frankly who can’t hold that Obama coalition? Donald Trump is a president who did not win a plurality of the public. In fact, one of my reports was leaked to the New York Times, saying that millennials were rejecting the binary choice of the lesser of two evils.
When you look at the exit data, you have 8 or 9 percent of younger African-Americans voting third-party. You have 6 or 7 percent of younger Latinos voting third-party. Hillary is almost off Barack Obama’s winning margins by the same percentage of our young people voting third party. So that’s how [Trump] squeaked in.
Again, Trump didn’t expand the Republican tent. He didn’t bring in all these millions upon millions of new Republican voters. This was about Democrats losing, more so than Trump remaking the electorate and winning in some sort of profound and new way. It should not have been a winning percentage, right? ...
When you look at battleground state after battleground state, Hillary was off Obama’s margins by five or six points and Trump was, at best, one or two points up in Michigan or Wisconsin or Florida. Again, it wasn’t like he was four, five points better than Mitt Romney. It was that she was five or six points below what Barack Obama did.
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Rand Paul slams John McCain, says he would have bankrupted the country by now with perpetual war
McCain's in Munich slamming Trump as a dictator. McCain's proving everyday what a horrible president he would have made.
Senator Rand Paul, putting the embarrassing man in his place, here:
“He would bankrupt the nation. We’re very lucky John McCain’s not in charge, because I think we’d be in perpetual war,” Paul added.
Senator Rand Paul, putting the embarrassing man in his place, here:
“He would bankrupt the nation. We’re very lucky John McCain’s not in charge, because I think we’d be in perpetual war,” Paul added.
Nathan Lewis thinks pretty highly of Judy Shelton's book on the gold standard
Here:
Today, the Federal Reserve, with the blessing of Congress, large banks, and many others, has embarked on an open-ended policy of printing money on a daily basis, basically to fund the Federal government's budget deficit although no one may speak such things in name. These situations tend to end badly, and are soon followed -- as was the case with the United States in 1789, immediately after the Continental Dollar hyperinflation of the 1780s -- by a rigorous gold standard system, more along the lines of the other four proposals that Shelton identifies.
The biggest gold standard advocates are those who lived through a hyperinflation. It is easy to forget that the hard money advocates of 1789 -- Hamilton, Jefferson, et. al -- were actually the same people that were printing money to finance Federal budget deficits in the 1780s, in the guise of the Continental Congress. Oops. More recently, people like Ludwig von Mises, who lived through the Austrian hyperinflation of the 1920s, became the biggest gold standard advocates of the 20th century.
Larry Kudlow likes her a lot, too, and had her on his show yesterday. You can listen to the podcast about an hour and twenty in at wabcradio.com: Go to the Saturday schedule and scroll down for the podcast.
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Friday, February 17, 2017
CNBC and WaPo just plain lie: Cost of Air Force One alone under Obama was $577 million
But here's CNBC lying through its teeth, relying on WaPo lying through its teeth, putting the cost at less than 17% of that:
Trump's time in office could cost taxpayers "hundreds of millions of dollars or more," topping the estimated $97 million of travel-related expenses during the Obama administration, the Post reported.
Trump can fly to Mar-a-Lago and back every weekend for 9.2 years before he spends what Obama spent flying everywhere.
Michigan man outs sexual past of libertarian teacher in Texas on Facebook, gets her fired but only because she told on herself
Facebook. Why are you people on there again?
From the story, here:
DISD initially cleared her in an internal investigation last March, when officials first learned of her past. But the district didn’t move to terminate her until last fall. Woodward is active in the Libertarian Party, and a Michigan man took issue with one of her posts and “outed” her on Facebook. She was removed from the classroom after alerting the district about the man's action.
Up for reelection, sexist Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill gets out front early distancing herself from progressives even though she is one
“Many of those people are very impatient with me because they don't think I'm pure. For example, they think I should be voting against all of Trump's nominees and of course I'm judging each nominee on its own merit," she said.
Says the woman who gave her opponent Republican Todd Akin money in order to defeat him.
She's pure all right, pure trouble, deception and lies.
McCaskill gets a D- on immigration reduction from NumbersUSA here, and votes with conservatives in Congress only about 13% of the time, making her . . .
very liberal.
She backed same sex marriage. She backed Hillary Clinton. She might as well represent Connecticut.
Wake up, Missouri, ditch this bitch who thinks men should just shut the hell up.
She backed same sex marriage. She backed Hillary Clinton. She might as well represent Connecticut.
Wake up, Missouri, ditch this bitch who thinks men should just shut the hell up.
Story in the Daily Beast about rift between Obama's OFA and Democrat Party smells like a ruse to me
As in, move along, ignore the OFA, nothing to see here.
I don't think so.
The story here wants us to take seriously the idea that Democrat regulars have a very low opinion of Organizing for America. But every Democrat is cheering that this organization is putting hostile audiences at Republican townhall meetings to protest Trump, support Obamacare, promote immigration at airports, yada yada yada.
Democrat regulars will have to do better than a "leaked email" and some lies told with a wink and a nod.
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